Entertainment

Google+ Adds Creative Kit Photo Fun and What’s Hot [HANDS-ON]

Google has been busy (and a little scary) today. It’s unveiled a host of new Google+ features, including enhanced photo-editing tools, a new What’s Hot area and a viral visualization for posts. Plus, Google is finally making its upstart social network Google+ available to Google Apps users.

Photo editing in Google+ is not new, but the Creative Kit, which adds a wide range of pre-made and fairly powerful photo-editing filters is. Google also used the opportunity to add a special set of Halloween filters.

The search giant snuck out the news this morning by letting some of its execs and a select group of celebrities Halloween-ize their own profile pictures prior to the announcement. These limited edition effects are now available to all Google+ members as part of the Creative Kit. I gave them a test-drive and found them intuitive and fun to use. They do not auto-transform your photos into scary Halloween surprises, but offer enough pre-sets and controls, like Draculan Dermis and Vampire Eyes, to help you apply some pretty entertaining effects to some of the 3.4 billion photos Google+ members have already reportedly posted on the service.

Check out the gallery to see what I did with Google’s Halloween photo filters.

Google also unveiled “What’s Hot,” a new area that appears just below your new posts in Google+ and a new menu item on the right side of the interface. I had to sign in and out to finally see the “Hot stuff.” The feature’s designed to help Google+ users weed through the “billions” of posts added to the service each day. Google promised that What’s Hot “isn’t just the same old faces, we do our best to provide a variety of posts.” Fair enough, but we did notice posts from Google+ heavyweights and industry notables Mike Elgan, Chris Brogan and Google’s own Natalie Villalobos.

The third item on Google’s list is Ripples, a new post visualization tool that should help Google+ users understand how posts spread among their contacts and beyond. Sadly, this feature may be rolling out slowly because I couldn’t get it working on my Google+ account.

Editing Photos in Google+ Creative Kit

Accessing Creative Kit

You access Google+'s Creative Kit by selecting a photo from your photo albums and then choosing Edit. Creative Kit is a selection under there.

Using Google+ Creative Kit

The new editing tools in Google+ include a number of pre-set image filters and effects.

Using Google+ Creative Kit to Edit

There are a number of basic adjustments like cropping and contrast, as well as Auto Fix.

Using Google+ Creative Kit's Halloween Effects

The Limited Edition Halloween Effects are suitably silly.

Edit in Creative Kit Adjustments

Each filter has a variety of settings including brush size and opacity (known here as "fade")

Edit in Creative Kit Overlays

The Creative Kit even lets you overlay pre-made images and then resize, distort and rotate them before placing them on your image.

Edit in Creative Kit Save It

You can replace the original image with your edited work or save it as a new photo.

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